Being tracked.
 

By sponsoring ryl, I believe they give you a bigger inbox size.

As for people tracking you, you could create another account which doesn't reveal your name/location etc for sensitive posts.

x

Hum it's a tricky one.

The most basic way to ensure you aren't found is by limiting what info you give away on ryl.

For example a Katie who lives in any big city is pretty anonymous compared to a *insert completely random name* who lives in a small town.

and so on.

I'm open about my identity on here but I highly doubt google would ever be able to link to me as Im a Camilla who lives in London and I'm pretty sure there are thousand of those.

So maybe bear those points in mind when you post and look through past posts to see if your giving anything that will render you recognisable.

Maybe use a nickname instead of your actual name [this is fine as long as you don't pretend to be another person], and don't post your location.

Nothing can be fully removed from the internet

Yeah if you don't post your name or city, and don't link ryl to other social sites that people could link here to you, it's pretty impossible for them to assign this profile to you. Also not posting pictures of you helps a lot too. You could go through your posts and delete ones that have any such information and make sure your profile has a nickname and only very general location if any at all and that you don't have links to sites that you communicate with people in "real life".

Also, it's helpful to google yourself in numerous ways to see what comes up. I've also worried about this for my career too, but I've picked through google and am not able to find myself in ways I wouldn't want, and so I'm pretty confident in the anonymity. The biggest problem I see is when people link personal facebooks to here or emails that they use outside ryl. Cause someone can google your email or fb link and get hits on a place like this in some cases if you've put it on your profile/in a post.

The chances of someone caring enough to do that are low, but if you protect yourself against it, then it's almost impossible that someone would find your posts on here. And yes its true that nothing can be entirely deleted, but stuff is fairly rapidly deleted from standard google searches, and even cached pages start to disappear from searches after a while. Basically you can just make it so difficult to find you that no one would ever be able to figure out how let alone go to the trouble to do it.

I agree with the last post. People have asked me to talk to them on facebook but I don't have any of those things, messenger/ AIM/ that the RYL profile asks you to fill in.

One of the things I have always wondered about is how much information is visible to a "guest" as we always seem to have more of those than members on the forum.

Work harder to not disclose your private information- be wary of people who ask you to- and also consider if you really want to be employed by people who are going to hold this sort of thing against you. This is not an embarrassing picture on facebook. People come here for help. You aren't doing anything wrong in doing that, and definitely should not be worried about having it "held against you".

Trust me- I feel the same way- but I have to get better.